After PEZ and Sweethearts, MTB/PAMP adds Bazooka bubblegum to its range of silver bullion homages to classic sweets

In the early 1950s, the Topps Company, famous now for its trading card business, tasked cartoonist Wesley Morse with creating a new set of characters for comics to go with the ‘Bazooka’ bubblegum it had released in 1947 He came up with the eyepatch-wearing Bazooka Joe and his gang, including Pesty, Mort, Hungry Herman, Jane, and Tuffy, along with a dog, Walkie Talkie.

These were not normal comics, however, but rather small comic strips on cards randomly placed in each pack of bubblegum. All told, there have been over 1,500 different strips through the seven decades since it debuted, and they’re popular with collectors. It’s still available today, with the comics translated into local languages worldwide. Each strip is built around a child-friendly joke, and there’s a ‘fortune’ on the bottom of them. In true American style, they would also contain an advertisement.

The Swiss company PAMP, and its US subsidiary, MTB, have had great success with their PEZ range of silver bullion tablets, and they followed that popularity with Sweethearts, following the same playbook of reproducing in silver, the physical candy. Bazooka is the third of these classic homages, and the silver component is the biggest yet, dwarfing the previous ranges, for no other reason than the bubblegum in the Bazooka pack was larger.

One side of the 40 gram silver ingot has a repeating pattern of the word ‘Bazooka’, over which is the official 75th anniversary logo. The obverse features the inscribed composition, the PAMP logo, and a portrait of Bazooka Joe. The presentation looks superb, and each of the 3,000 will contain one of three cards, that vary in popularity. We’re not sure if we like the idea of random cards, however. This isn’t a cheap pack of bubblegum where getting a set won’t cost a fortune, but a silver product with a near-$120 retail price. Random specials killed the trading card market, and this was the reason, so we’d rather have just seen them pack the three cards in each pack.

A minor point, however, for what is a very cool celebration of a candy classic, and it fits in with the PEZ and Sweetheart ranges perfectly. I’ll probably modify our PEZ profile to cover the other ranges as well, so keep an eye out for that. Available now.